


Out of the Blue

by qaftsiel



Category: Magic: The Gathering, Supernatural
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Magic: the Gathering AU, Ravnica, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-04-17 19:25:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14196042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qaftsiel/pseuds/qaftsiel
Summary: After an angel hauls him out of the closest place to Hell that Ravnica has to offer, Dean can't get blue eyes and bluer wings out of his head... and, for over a year afterwards, he's convinced the memories are just another hallucination courtesy of the Rakdos carnage pit he'd been hauled from.That is, he's pretty sure about it until said hallucination crash-lands through his living room window with a mystery (and a bunch of fancy golden coins) in tow.(Magic: The Gathering AU set on Ravnica, because I can.)





	Out of the Blue

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, all. I'm not dead, just caught in a never-ending cycle of work insanity (merger number three looming on the horizon, dear God I hope it's all just speculation), depression, and one flavour of physical illness or another.
> 
> This is a Magic: the Gathering AU I've been kicking around during lunch breaks for a while now. It's set on Ravnica, a plane/planet covered in an Eastern European Gothic-flavoured megacity, all powered by the magic of ten powerful Guilds. The Guilds each cover some aspect of civil life, like engineering, policing, law, or entertainment, and the rivalries between them run deep (and quite hot, in some cases). Rule number one in Magic, though: angels aren't guys unless something seriously weird is going on (much to my chagrin, but I digress).
> 
> I hope to write more for it at some point when life better allows for it, but the part posted here can stand on its own for now. I hope y'all enjoy.

Dean never forgets.

He gets lost in the haze-- no way to avoid that, not when the air’s a fuckin stew of psychotropics, stimulants, and vaporized gore. He loses track of time, loses count of how many times he’s flayed and been flayed, even loses his hearing for a while after a few too many of those fucking showstopper routines where the real crazies bust apart like balloons, laughing and screaming all the while, but he never forgets that this was the right choice.

He never forgets stopping by that damn Orzhov-run firm and discovering his brother turned into a bare shade of himself. He never forgets the gauntness of Sammy’s face, the dark circles under his eyes, the manic grin still ticking away at the corners of his mouth. He never forgets his baby brother’s stupid, floppy hair gone lank and matted, and he never forgets the seared marks in Sammy’s skin, peeking out from the sleeves of his black-and-cream contractor’s robes-- jagged Rakdos half-skulls, three on each arm, flanked by healing puncture wounds.

He’d recognized those burns then; he knows them intimately now, sees them every day on his own skin.

Not that he cares for very long (the revelry never really stops, not at the very heart of Rix Maadi), and it’s not like Dean can refuse, because this was his choice. He’d known it going in, because how couldn’t he? The Orzhov Syndicate's tithe-drinkers and deal-makers don’t let their little contracted intern slaves go without equal payment and interest; that much has always been common knowledge throughout the City. He’d known, and still he’d marched back into Orzhova with his life and the rest of his savings in hand and a Conclave rehabilitationist waiting for Sammy at the gates.

He never forgets, and so he lets himself be swept and sold away, taking out his pain and his fear on the all-too-willing cultists swarming Rix Maadi’s fucked-up halls, because Sammy is somewhere out there, freed from the Church’s clutches.

Agony, sharp and hot, wraps around Dean’s chest like a burning brand as Alastair’s chain falls. “Now that’s just not fair, cupcake,” the demon whines, barely audible over the screams from the Juri Revue in the next chamber. “I want you here with me, not off in that pretty head of yours.” The chain falls again; Dean bites back the scream that tries to escape. “Don’t bottle those screams, lovely. Sing for me.”

Sometimes, though, the haze doesn’t hold so well. “Fuck you,” Dean snarls, straining at the rack’s restraints even as Alastair winds up for another lash. “Fuck you, you sicko, and fuck this place, and--”

Lightning flashes a sickly purple-green, too bright and the wrong color to be the Revue or even a Legion raid. The whole chamber shakes with a peal of thunder, and then something bright crashes through the ceiling (straight through the fucking rock, gods) and slams into the floor, scattering rubble and rioters in all directions. Alastair has to duck away from the rack to avoid a flying chunk of blackened flagstone, and in the moment Dean’s view is unobstructed, he sees him.

A man, shrouded in rippling, many-colored light, stands from the impact point, and looks around wide-eyed and horrified before turning and staring directly at Dean.

The whole room explodes when the man unfurls wings.

It’s all a fucking mess from there. Dean’s woozy from blood loss and from the ever-present haze, and now there’s a different sort of screaming and fighting going on, and he thinks he sees the male angel (???) draw a blazing-white sword. It’s impossible to follow; there’s flashing lights as that blade whistles through the air and those bluer-than-blue wings flare and slice at rioters, and his brain’s so fucking fried trying to understand the male actually a dude angel in shining armor and haloed by glinting skeins of floating, golden medallions that he loses track, and then suddenly the dude angel is all up in his face, and there are blue eyes gazing into his and a hand gripping his shoulder, burning, and he thinks he should be afraid but instead, for the first time in forever, he just feels safe, and--

\-- Dean blacks out.

***

Dean never forgets.

“Charliiiie, I need that steamcore over here!” he growls over the električka’s guts, struggling to keep the temporary generator line in place lest the whole damn thing collapse on him.

It’s basic work, repairing the stupid things-- the hardest part is keeping the engine assemblies from imploding without the weird in place-- but working for the Izzet’s a hell of a lot better than being stuck in that fucking Conclave hippie-dippie hospital with Sammy and his superhot centaur girl Jasna mother-henning him over every goddamn thing. 

Besides, the Izzet Parun’s kind of a cool dude for a giant-ass, egomaniacal dragon, and he lets Dean dick around and do what he wants in his own shop instead of treating him like an invalid or promoting him to project lead or some boring shit like that.

“Sorry!” Charlie pants, scrambling up the električka’s skeleton with the weird in tow. She’s always had a knack with the things, and they seem to like her back (or, they like her as much as highly-volatile amalgamations of fire, water, and lighting elementals can like someone). They listen to her, at any rate, and this one’s no exception, slithering its crackling, blue-goo body into the weird-nacelle like it’s happy to be there. 

As soon as the nacelle hatch claps shut, the električka buzzes and then thrums, righting itself and floating a foot off of Dean’s shop floor. A few of the bolts in the passenger seats rattle, but it’s quick work to tighten those up, buff out the scrapes and gunk still marring the locomotive’s sides, and then slap the shop’s repair-mark in the corner of one of the side panels-- an ultramarine silhouette of a winged person standing in a ring of small, golden stars.

No, Dean never forgets-- and he’ll never forget the blue-eyed, blue-winged angel that pulled him from Rix Maadi.

“Still thinkin about her, huh?”

Dean rolls his eyes and gives Charlie a long-suffering look. “The angel was a dude, Charles, I’ve told you this. Bout my height, blue eyes, crazy rainbow lightshow, and definitely a dude.”

Charlie snorts and shakes her head. “All right, man, but you know as well as I do what that Boros constable had to say about that.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. ‘Such an abomination would not be permitted to exist,’” he mocks, affecting a snooty moue. The Boros Legion’s glorified errand-boys, much like their trumped-up ‘Enforcer’ military-cop gangs and their nutjob archangel Parun (and, to be honest, the rest of the entire fucking guild), were assholes. “‘Angels are purity and beauty and light, and we men are none of those things. Even the Orzhov know this.’ I still say it’s bullshit. I saw what I saw, and he was a dude.” He grins at Charlie’s squawk of outrage when he reaches out to ruffle her coppery-bright hair. “You watch. I’m gonna find him, Charles, and you’ll see!”

The shop window over Dean’s workbench clatters as a tiny, blue-tinged woman with dragonfly wings lets herself in. She drops a bundle of wiring into the appropriate bin on the workbench before buzzing over to Charlie’s shoulder. “See what?”

“Dean’s Not-A-Chick Angel,” Charlie teases warmly, winking at Dean before turning her head to accept a kiss from her diminutive wife. “Says he’s gonna bring him home to meet us, Gijlde.”

Gijlde thinks that over while she studies Dean with all the gravity the situation really doesn’t deserve. “I shall pluck him like a Festival kura if he hurts our darling Dinitrije,” she declares at length, firmly. 

Dean scowls to hide the fact that he’s kind of warmed by their gentle ribbing. “I don’t need you defending my honor,” he grumps, herding Charlie (and thus Gijlde) toward the second električka. “Already got Sammy and Jasna to do that.”

Charlie snorts. “You need it, Dean.” She flips the weird-nacelle open and makes a few kissy noises; after a moment of something like consideration, the weird burbles up and out of the nacelle. Dean lunges in with the temporary line as soon as the last of the weird spills free; the engine judders ominously, but doesn’t implode. Charlie nods approvingly. “Okay. Looks like it’s a corroded alternator; we all know the drill for that, right?”

Gijlde rolls her eyes and Dean huffs out a laugh. “Is that even a question?”

Charlie’s insulating gloves creak as she hauls them up to her shoulders. “Sure hope not.” Grasping the new alternator in one shielded hand, she then reaches into the live electromag suspension assembly, fishes around casually like she’s not elbow deep in ten thousand volts, and makes the swap with the kind of sudden precision a Legion spearman only wishes he could have. The assembly screams offense at the intrusion, but Gijlde’s there to dive in after the alternator, wings buzzing with her native electrical power. Dean can’t see it from where he’s stationed, but he’s watched the little lightning sprite at her work before-- bathed in electricity and using her wings like field gauges, she makes minute adjustments to the part’s position in the assembly until it’s positioned just so. Sure enough, the smooth, harmonic thrum of a balanced assembly fills the shop just a few moments later and Gijlde pops out of the crackling field wild-haired and snapping with residual overcharge.

Dean watches Charlie coax the weird back into its nacelle while Gijlde does drunken, dizzy loops about her head and sends a mental ‘thank you’ to the gods and the Parun for sending the two his way. Thing is, Dean’s pretty proud-- he’s smart enough that he’s had to petition the Parun to reject ‘promotions’ (more like acquisitions) to bigger shops and projects from chemisters and engineers higher up in the Guild organization-- but he’s totally man enough to admit that he doesn’t have an ounce of Charlie-and-Gijlde’s special, lunatic vintage of bravery. 

Sometimes he wishes he did. He’d have gone back to Rix Maadi and found that angel himself, but instead he’d licked his wounds and started fixing and making shit for the Izzet. 

Dean rubs at the tingling handprint still burned into his shoulder and frowns. Some good guy he is. Angel probably wouldn’t want anything to do with him, not after he’d left the poor guy down in that hellhole for an entire year.

Fuck’s sake. He’s even been profiting off of the guy’s image, he thinks as he stencils said silhouette onto the električka’s side.

Dean’s a real piece of work.

“Aw, Deanie, don’t look so sad! You’ll find your pretty angel boy, I promise!” Charlie sings, slapping his ass and knocking him out of his thoughts. “Aaaand theeeen you can bring him back here and warn us ahead of time, right?”

“What now?” 

Charlie titters. “Advance warning. I want it. I love you but I don’t wanna hear it when he drills you into that ratty mattress of yours.” This last line is delivered with a stunningly crude gesture involving open hands and hip thrusts.

“Fucking gods, Charlie,” Dean gasps, snapping his grease-covered shop towel at the mechanic’s retreating back. She squeaks and cackles, clattering upstairs to the apartment, Gijlde careening after her, and Dean’s only just started to give chase when there’s a crash and a pair of yelps that he just knows means something’s been broken. “Aww, come on, Charles! I just cleaned up there!”

There’s no reply.

Dean goes up the stairs a bit more carefully-- it takes a lot to silence Charlie’s sass. His boots crunch on shards of glass as he crests the stairs, and the spray only gets denser the closer he gets to the apartment parlor. “Charlie? Gijlde? You okay?”

Finally, he turns the corner into the sitting room and stops.

“S-so, um, a-about that, uh, dude... ?” Charlie stammers out when she sees him. She’s edging across the floor, away from the worst of the glass, but Dean’s still frozen in the doorway, staring wide-eyed.

There, sprawled on the floor in a sea of shattered glass and glittering, golden disks, is the angel.

***

Hauling an unconscious angel-dude (angel dude, angel that is not female, guy angel, what the fuck, Dean is still so not over this) out of the ruined living room and into Dean’s bedroom is harder than expected for exactly none of the reasons Dean had anticipated. The guy’s ridiculously lightweight, despite the shiny half-plate he’s still wearing, but his wings-- Guilds, they’ve gotta be fifteen feet wide at least, and every time he gets one of the patchy, dulled things gathered up, the other just flops out of his hold. They end up doing an awkward tandem carry, Dean holding the angel like a bride against his chest and Charlie doing her best to keep his damaged wings off the floor.

They deposit him on his side on the bed-- Dean’s afraid they’ll hurt his wings more if they try to rearrange them so he’s on his back-- and Charlie immediately starts to undo the fastenings on the angel’s armor. She tugs it away piece by piece, revealing a long, embroidered tunic that might have been white at one time. The drape of the worn, dank fabric over the angel’s body hints at a whipcord-thin, deep chested build, like one of the Conclave’s gaze-hounds; where the angel’s wings disappear into slits cut into the tunic, Dean can see lean, powerful musculature supporting the limbs.

Removing the armor also reveals the black-iron shackles and collar still biting into the angel’s wrists and neck.

“Get me the silvered cutters, Charlie,” Dean grits out. He’s seen (worn) this crap before, and seeing it on his angel has him seeing red. The same stuff that goes into Rakdos cultists' riteknives and the gore-house hooks and chains, no one knows what the blackened, oily material is actually called-- all the cityfolk and other Guilds know is that the Rakdos’ cursed metal is as bloodthirsty and vicious as the Lord of Riots himself. It digs teeth into its victims like a living thing, slithers into the veins and burns, searing the body from the inside out. It tears away time and thought like tissue paper.

Dean still remembers its scalding bite a little too well.

Charlie is gone and back before he’s mastered himself, but his hands are steady when he takes the cutters and gently slides them between the black-iron and the raw, weeping wounds that undoubtedly lay below.

Even with the silver, it takes him hours to pry every last thorn and spike from the angel’s flesh. The black-iron fights, squealing and writhing whenever the silver touches it, going from iron to butter under the blades and flowing away to redouble its grip elsewhere. Dean chases it down with grim determination-- douses the angel’s bloodied, torn skin with Conclave-blessed water and Azorius curse-lifter, smears the last of his stash of Boros holy oil around the black-iron until it’s greyed, brittle, and trapped. The angel’s powers help him along, too; with every spike he pulls free, there’s a pulse that ripples through the angel’s body, restoring his color even as it burns at the black-iron.

Finally, when the last withered tooth of the black-iron comes away in Dean’s grip, the angel shudders and gasps. The multicolored light Dean remembers from Rix Maadi flickers to life over the ravaged skin at the angel’s wrists and throat; all three of the mechanics watch in amazement as the angel’s wounds clean and close themselves in seconds. When the light fades, he looks a thousand times better-- still paler than Dean remembers, and his wings are still only half-feathered, but he has some peachiness to his skin again, and his remaining feathers have regained some of that deep, bluer-than-blue glow.

“You really weren’t kidding,” Charlie says, turning to regard Dean with wide eyes. “Crazy rainbow lightshow, male angel… I’m not even going to question the whole ‘blue eyes’ thing at this point, because that. Is. A dude angel. That’s… that’s not even a real thing, Dean!”

Dean throws a pointed glance at the angel. Charlie’s not wrong-- Dean’s never heard of anything like a male angel in any history-- but… there he is, conked out in Dean’s bed. As if on cue, the angel produces a soft snore and snugs his wings around himself like blankets. “Real enough for me,” Dean replies, and gathers up the towel full of deadened black-iron. “Let’s let him rest. Got a lotta cleanup to do.”

***

Somehow, Dean isn’t very surprised when the Boros-made blast furnace positively howls as soon as he’s fed the dead black-iron into it. Then again, even cheap-ass Legion pocket knives get hot when there’s a cultist nearby, so it kind of makes sense that the crusaders’ smiths would build some kind of anti-Rakdos overdrive into their furnaces.

“Hoo boy. Never seen it burn like that,” Charlie whistles. She gives the blast furnace a wide berth. “Broughtcha the glass from the window. Gijlde and I pulled the frame, too-- it was kinda crumbly in places, so hey, we might as well get a new one, right?”

Dean eyes the box full of broken, colored glass and sighs. “Guess so. I’ll leave that up to you, but if you get another practically-nekkid faerie window, Charles, I swear--”

“Who, me?” Charlie gasps, even though she’d done exactly that the last time they broke a window. He still keeps the curtains drawn in the kitchen when he’s cooking or doing dishes-- there are very, very few things more awkward than having a nearly naked portrait of your best friend’s wife as the window over your kitchen sink. At Dean’s longsuffering glare, she laughs. “Okay, okay. I’ll be a good girl.” She plunks the box of broken glass down by the scrap pile and spins on her heel. “I’m thinking naked angels this time. Dude ones, just to piss those Legion jerks off.”

Dean’s longsuffering glare turns to one of mild alarm. “Tell me you’re joking,” he says. “Seriously, don’t do that. I buy Boros shit ‘cause I don’t got options, okay? I don’t trust them--”

“--any more than the Rakdos, I know,” Charlie sighs. “I hear the news too, Dean. I won’t risk drawing their attention.”

He hears the truth in Charlie’s tone, but it still takes Dean a while to relax. With that Guildpact guy gone without a trace for over a year, no one’s been around to mediate and keep the worst tendencies of some of the more evangelistic guilds (read: the Boros) in check. It hadn’t been much at first; just more stop-and-frisk crap than usual, but now? If you aren’t Boros, you’re suspect, and no one’s sure what the definition of ‘not Boros’ might have come to encompass on any given day. Dean’s questions about male angels could be written off as another addle-brained Izzet mage’s ravings, but a large, street-facing window on an upper floor with naked angels, never mind male ones? 

He’d be marked for death, regardless of his favored status with one of the city’s ten Paruns. People in similar positions of power had been killed over less.

“Any word from Sam?”

Dean shrugs. “Not a lot. He’s under a nondisclosure agreement, so he can’t give me much more than a hint here or there, but it sounds like the Jelenn have convened and are at least debating what to do about 'em.” He chuckles. “Mostly it’s Jasna this, Jasna that. You’d think she put all the stars in the sky just for him, the way he talks about her.”

“Aww,” Charlie coos. It’s honest admiration-- Sammy and Jasna are one of those gross, lovey-dovey couples that no one can quite manage to hate because they’re just so fuckin’ adorable (not that Dean would ever say that aloud). “Are they still talking to the Simic, or…?”

“Nah. Jasna’s talking adoption now; neither of them really trusted the private biomancer they were referred to.” Dean may or may not have had a hand in discouraging them; he'll swear by Simic medical service within Azorius-regulated hospitals, but fertility’s not one of those services. Also-- trusting the Simic to hybridize human-Sammy and centaur-Jasna’s baby without ‘improving’ anything? Fat fucking chance. It’d be like asking an Izzet technomancer to ‘just’ build a flying machine. You’d ask for a toy thopter and you’d end up getting an exploding, life-size, rocket-powered dragon. 

Sammy is a floppy-haired pain in Dean’s ass, but Sammy does not deserve an exploding, life-size, rocket-powered dragon baby. 

Charlie seems to cotton onto Dean’s train of thought. “Oh. Yeah, that’s… that’s probably better that way, isn’t it? Plax babies. Ew.” She shudders. “Okay. Enough of that. Amalka owes me a favour; I’m gonna go bug her about the new window.” 

“No nekkid people,” Dean reminds her as he hands over the shop purse. “You know what? Just order the Parun’s crest. We’re going for Nice and Wholesome. We don’t need the Boros dragging us into the street over a bad joke.”

Serious for once, Charlie nods. She stuffs the purse into one of the pouches on her belt, then whistles for Gijlde. “Be back in a few,” she says with a wave as she leaves.

***

There’s nothing to work on in the shop with the električka done and the furnace starting to wind down. Bored, Dean grabs his gloves and goes back upstairs-- there’s probably still glass stuck in the carpet or between the chair cushions or something like that, so he can totally make himself useful by checking all the weird spots.

Instead, he gets sidetracked by the glint of gold in the kitchen. He approaches the countertop and the medallions laid out on it. He remembers these, he thinks-- they’d been floating around the angel that day he was raised from Rix Maadi.

They’re all bright, shiny, and yellow, though he can tell that some are just plated and others are polished brass or bronze. The less-valuable ones are thinner, and tend to fairly simple iconography-- crossed gauntlets ringed by linear engravings, the silhouette of a bird in flight, a rising sun over a meadow. A few have cloisonne and silvery inlays, and the style of artwork seems to be of a different origin than the plain metal ones. When Dean picks up an inlaid medallion depicting a stylized, hulking beast, he smells trees and the medallion pulses gently in his hand, as if echoing distant, giant footfalls. He sets it down quickly, and leaves its siblings alone.

The most elaborate medallions are also the thickest-- they’re individually crafted from what has to be pure gold, chunky edges dimpled by the telltale marks of an artisan’s tools. Feminine angels with wings outspread, two-eyed maaka with flowing manes and hooves, and towering, ornate cathedrals almost leap off of the metal, every texture lovingly rendered in painstaking detail. Unfamiliar sigils ring the images with unreadable writing, and the medallions glow with some sort of inner warmth that’s got nothing to do with the light in the room. Dean doesn’t even consider trying to touch the fancy ones.

Whatever they are-- and there’s a good two or three dozen of the things, all in all-- they’re almost definitely enchanted with some sort of magic. Dean’s got about as much magical aptitude as a wrench, but the aura’s so strong at this range that he can practically taste it. 

It’s wide open spaces, vast parks without cities. 

It’s places where people aren’t. 

It’s totally, utterly alien.

Dean backs away from the counter, unsettled by the not-quite-imagery he’s getting, and bumps into something warm and solid. Completely thrown, he whirls, fists clenched, and finds himself face to face with the angel, standing there in his dirty tunic. “You!” he blurts out.

The angel looks nonplussed. He tilts his head and studies Dean closely with those blue, blue eyes. 

“Ashalom,” the angel rumbles, and almost immediately looks confused.

For a moment, they both stand there, wide-eyed.

The angel turns away, brow furrowed, and produces a fluid string of more strange words. Whatever the angel hears, though, it’s definitely not what he’s apparently expecting. Stepping around Dean briskly, the angel snatches up one of the simple brass medallions from the countertop and squints into the polished surface.

All of the feathers still on the angel’s wings stand on end as he produces a bark of startlement. The medallion clatters to the floor as the angel’s hands fly to his face, fingertips scraping over the short beard and tracing the strong, square jaw. He pats at his chest in bafflement, and then Dean barely has enough time to slap his hands over his eyes before the angel lifts up the grimy tunic without so much as a by-your-leave. “Dude! What the fuck!? Warn a guy before you go flashing your junk around!” Dean squawks, shifting his fingers over so he can wave a hand at the angel without unblocking his eyes.

The angel growls something out, bitchy enough that Dean doesn’t really need to understand the words to get the gist of it. “Okay, okay, but dude. Seriously. Just… sit down, and… just sit, okay?” He points, hopefully in the same direction as any of the chairs in the sitting room.

Either he pointed the right way or the angel is smart enough to get the idea, because Dean hears that obnoxious squeak from the cushion of the chair nearest the kitchen. “Okay. Stay there.” Dropping his hand, Dean stomps back into his bedroom and digs up a towel and some clean clothes. He pops back out and waves at the angel. “Come on. Come over here.”

The angel, tunic back where it should be, stands and pads after Dean, wings furled close about his shoulders. When Dean throws open the door to the bathroom, he makes a questioning noise.

Dean tosses the bundle of clothing on top of the closed latrine and gestures to the spigot and knobs at the head of the claw-foot tub. “That’s your hot water,” he says, “and that’s your cold.” He barely remembers to turn one of the knobs to demonstrate-- who the fuck knows if angels have running water? “Soap’s here. Have at it.”

He sees the angel peering into the mirror over the sink as he goes to shut the bathroom door. The guy looks like he doesn’t recognize his own reflection, but from what Dean can remember, not much has really changed since Rix Maadi. That and the thing with the voice-- hadn’t the angel talked in the last year? What had they done to him down there?

Dumb question-- Dean totally knows what they do down there.

If anything, the angel probably had it worse.

At loose ends, Dean does what he always does when he’s got a lot of pressing questions that don’t have answers-- he goes to the kitchen, pulls down his mother’s old cookbook, and stress bakes.

By the time the angel emerges from the bathroom, half-dried damp hair going every which way despite his continuing efforts to tame it, Dean has a pie in the oven and medovníky cooling on the countertop next to the medallions. Out of sheer impulsivity, he’s decorated them to look a lot like the brass and bronze disks. 

Hopefully they’re not, like, some kind of religious icon or something. It’s probably not good to make edible versions of someone else’s religious stuff.

Maybe stress baking wasn't the best idea.

“Hey,” he says, watching the angel examine the cookies. The angel glances up at him with a raised eyebrow and the barest hint of an upward tilt to his mouth. “I, uh, made medovníky?”

The angel tilts his head and squints. “Meh-dov-neek?”

Dean chuckles. Close enough. He points to the cookies again. “Medovníky.” Pointing to the medallions, he says, “Medals.”

The angel tilts his head the other way. He touches one of the heavy, ornate medallions; it rises up from the countertop like a bubble and begins a gentle orbit around the angel. “Saymel.” He then plucks up one of Dean’s medovníky (it doesn’t start floating; Dean’s almost disappointed) and takes a bite out of it. “Oogiyah,” he provides through his mouthful, and looks pleased.

“Oogi-what now?”

The angel crunches away at the rest of the cookie and swallows. “Oogiyah.” Apparently that’s actually the word. He brushes crumbs from his tunic and uses a toe to absently nudge at the medallion-- the saymel-- he’d dropped earlier; it, too, begins to float, and drifts upward until it’s on the same serene path as its fancier cousin. The angel looks the lot on the counter over, then plucks a particularly pale gold saymel from amongst the others and holds it out to Dean. “Nagah,” he says, miming a touch to the polished surface.

Dean’s a little hesitant at first, but the angel’s been pretty much harmless so far, and it’s not like the other saymel he’d touched had caused any serious problems. “What the hell,” he sighs with a shrug, and reaches out to press his fingers against the metal.

It’s warm under his fingertips, warmer than it probably should be given the temperature in the apartment. After a moment, a static buzz races from his fingertips through the rest of him. “Whoa. Tingly. Is this shit dangerous?”

“It is harmless when used this way,” the angel rumbles, this time in perfectly-understandable Central. 

Dean gapes. “What. The actual fuck.”

“It has nothing to do with intercourse.” The angel’s head is tilted, almost like a confused puppy. “It is an ambassador’s sigil.” He blinks. “I suppose it could be used to facilitate intercourse between two individuals with no common languages, but it would be a gross abuse of the sigil’s intent and honor.”

Dean has no idea what to say to that. “You’re not talking weird any more,” he says instead, very intelligently. 

The angel stares at Dean for just a moment before closing his eyes and nodding. “Yes. Ambassador’s sigils represent language and bridging gaps.” He seems to think for a moment. “Grossly oversimplified, it is a universal translator.”

Without further comment, the angel takes another cookie (the one that looks like the stompy-critter medallion) and bites into it. 

A billion questions and comments and crap fly around Dean’s brain-- should he ask the angel where he came from? What a sigil is? What language he’d been speaking, or whether he really is an angel? Should he thank the guy for saving him? Offer him some of the pie in the oven?

Instead, the first thing to leave Dean’s mouth is, “So you wanna explain why you flashed me earlier, dude?”

The angel chomps down the last of the stompy-thing cookie; he raises one hand in a ‘wait’ gesture while he licks the crumbs from the fingertips of the other with a delicate pink tongue. Dean waits and tries (and fails) not to stare. “I was ascertaining the state of my genitalia,” the angel says, still licking at his fingertips to get the last of the icing. He’s totally oblivious to Dean’s blush and sputter. “It seems that, in being cast out of Valeron to... wherever this place is, much about me has been fundamentally altered.”

Dean crosses his arms and shifts uncomfortably and tries to come up with something suitably manly to say, because the glimpse he’d gotten before he’d thrown his hand over his eyes had been pretty friggen’ good, and-- fuck. He’s so fucking screwed. “Don’t see why you’re complaining about it,” he grumps, all too aware of the hot flush to his cheeks. 

The angel looks simultaneously confused and bashful. “I don’t intend to. I’ve spent the last… a considerable amount of time in that place, and did not have the capacity to examine myself, or understand.” He pales. “Is there something wrong? Am I misshapen?”

Gods save Dean from himself and from hot dude angels with fucking divine puppy eyes. “No! No, dude, you’re… you’re hot, okay?” Now he and the angel are both blushing. This is great. Everything is fine, Dean is fine, and Dean really needs to change the subject. “You’re fine. Better than fine. But what do you mean, ‘changed’? You not look like this before, or something?”

The angel nods. “I was female,” he says, “or, I had a female body, at any rate, though I never had regarded myself as particularly female or male beyond that.” He fluffs his wings, brings one up beneath his right arm so he can finger-comb the feathers with both hands. “My wings were golden, then, and much broader; I find I appreciate the mobility this shape provides, especially in so large a city.” He leans back to peer around Dean, out the empty window. There’s not much to see beyond the side and windows of the building across the street, but the angel seems fascinated nonetheless. “Is this Jhess? It must be, with such tall towers”

“Jhess?” Dean echoes. Maybe he’s just going to spend the whole day repeating things like a total moron. “What’s Jhess?”

Now it’s the angel’s turn to look confused. “It’s a nation, off the coast of Valeron. You do know Valeron, do you not?”

Dean shakes his head ‘no’ slowly. “I have no idea, dude. You said Jhess, Coast, and Valeron?”

The angel frowns. “Jhess and Valeron. Valeron is on the coast.”

“So… like an undercity? Is that the Coast?”

Now the angel’s really frowning. “A coast is where land meets the ocean.”

Dean blinks. Whatever that last word was, he’s pretty sure the sigil had translated it, but it’s not a word he knows, even if it exists in City language. Same goes for ‘coast’. Whatever ‘ocean’ is, it’s not land, and ‘coast’ is… a border? 

The angel takes in Dean’s baffled look and turn to look around the kitchen. “Do you have a map?” At Dean’s nod, he follows and eagerly takes up the folded parchment when Dean offers it to him. “Valeron is the largest landmass of the…” 

Shocked silence falls as the map finally unfurls in the angel’s hands. He stares at it, face completely blank, for long enough that Dean wonders if maybe the sigil isn’t translating the print. “You… need me to read it for you?” he offers, hesitant.

“I…” the angel starts, still staring. “I… no, I can read this, but I don’t understand. Where is… where is this? Is this everything?”

Jesus. The Rakdos must have done a number on this guy. “Yeah, dude. That’s the world. We’re here, in Ravnica proper, the Izzet district.” He points to a small, outlined, sort-of-square of city blocks not far from the center of the map. “You crash-landed through to the undercity levels here,” he adds, pointing a little down and to the right of the Izzet district. “Central Rakdos district.” He’s never really bothered to look outside Central Ravnica’s borders as far as township and satellite-city names go, but a cursory glance doesn’t show any Jhesses or Valerons anywhere. 

“This can’t be right,” the angel says, peering at the blank back of the map. “Where is everything else?”

Dean meets the angel’s baffled blue gaze with an equally confused one of his own. “What do you mean, ‘everything else’? This is everything.” 

“Where is your farmland?”

“Rooftops. Where the fuck else would things grow?”

The angel looks a little pale as he glances down at the map. “There’s no water,” he says, a little desperately. 

“Dude, there’s water everywhere. Those thick blue lines are the major branches of the Mains, and that’s all they print on these, because this whole map’d be blue if we drew in every last pipe.”

The angel looks at Dean like he’s lost the ability to understand him. “You… you mean to tell me there’s no open water here?”

Dean’s getting really confused. “We have fountains?” When that doesn’t seem to comfort the angel, he soldiers on. “Some of the aqueducts run open-air in places, and a few of the districts and satellite cities have open-air retention ponds and large-scale channels for shipping?” When that turns the angel even paler, Dean shakes his head and sighs exasperatedly. “Dude. Like… that’s water. That’s how it is. What are you even asking about?”

The angel’s grip on his shoulder is startlingly strong. Dean scuttles along under it as the angel hauls him back to the kitchen, where he quickly taps every last one of his medallions. They rise into the air obediently; that done, he then pushes the tray of medovníky aside. He spreads the map face-down, disappears back to Dean’s den area, and returns bearing (of all things) Charlie’s novelty quill-and-ink set. He dips the cut tip of the feather into the ink like he’s done it all his life and sets to work sketching on the back of the map. “I am beginning to think,” he rumbles shakily as he works, drawing squiggle after squiggle across the parchment, “that I am much, much farther from home than I thought.” 

Dean tries not to admire the pink tip of the angel’s tongue where it sticks out from the corner of his full lips. He doesn’t know what the wiggly, uneven shapes the angel is drawing are, so it’s hard to focus. “Yeah?”

With a last, quick dot of the quill, the angel sets it aside. He points at the shape that, if Dean squints, looks a little like a squashed T-bone steak. “That is the continent of Valeron,” he says, as if that explains everything. At Dean’s blank look, he continues. “This is a landmass, surrounded by open water.” His fingers trail between the squiggly shapes he’s drawn. “All of this area is open, deep water-- is ocean. These,” he says, pointing to each of the shapes in turn, “are continents, where the land is above water.” Finally, he points to the five or six dots he’d drawn scattered across the squiggly shapes-- the continents. “These are cities. The land around them is largely untouched-- no buildings, no development, no nothing.” He stares at Dean intently. “Is there no such place like that here?”

Dean thinks back to the terrifying sensation of openness one of the angel’s medallions had induced. He’s never been outside of Ravnica City proper, but he’s seen drawings of some of the Gruul Clan’s wildest ‘reclamation zones’. They’re still recognizably urban, with signs of artifice in nearly every nook and cranny, overgrown or not, and they invariably give way to the natural, municipal order of the rest of the world. “No,” he says, a little breathless. “No, we don’t have… there’s nothing like that here.” He peers down at the map and tries to imagine what so much water must be like. It’s hard to wrap his brain around it. “How big…?”

Something about the angel’s bearing has changed in the last few moments. “Vast,” he replies softly, almost sadly. “So vast that you cannot see across it, and if you set out on a sailing ship, there are places where you cannot see anything but water. When night falls, the stars fill the sky.” His fingertip brushes along one of the uneven outlines of the ‘continents’. “In a pond, the wind only has time to create ripples. Over the ocean, the wind travels unhindered, and ripples become waves, great rises that curl and crash onto the land, sometimes gently and sometimes with great violence.” He lifts his hand to delicately pluck one of his sigils from its slow drift in the air around him. “This is one of those sailing ships.”

It’s like a noble’s pleasure-barge, Dean thinks, but instead of familiar smokestacks and engines, the curved body of the craft is speared by three great pillars, each with numerous crossbars. The bars support material that, though not very detailed in the beaten metal, make Dean think of the way banners and sheets fly in the wind, especially when anchored top and bottom. “It uses the wind to move?” he asks, pointing. His finger brushes the metal, and suddenly his ears are full of the sound of crashing water, like a pulsating waterfall, and his nose is overwhelmed by the pungent scent of salt, fish, oil, and wet wood. “Holy shit.” He grabs onto the angel instinctively; it’s as if the floor had moved sickeningly beneath him for a moment. “What the fuck.”

A soft, tickling, heavy warmth curls around him firmly, pressing him tight against the angel’s side. A wing, Dean realizes-- the angel’s hugging him with a wing. He blushes furiously at the sensation of the angel’s laugh buzzing along where their bodies touch. “Ships do not sail gently over waves,” he remarks. “As I said-- they are quite large. Enough to bob a ship about as ripples might move a cork.”

Dean looks up at the angel in awe. “You really aren’t from here,” he says, and very nearly pulls a hand free to slap it over his own face for such an intelligent comment. “I mean… I’d call you a liar if you weren’t, well, you. These sigils, your drawing, the fact that you’re a guy and yet an angel… I mean, dude, how the fuck did you end up here?”

The angel looks thoughtful, and maybe even a little worried. “I… I don’t know,” he says, bowing his head. The wing across Dean’s shoulder droops a little. “I honestly don’t know.”

**Author's Note:**

> Rakdos Cult: entertainment/ultraviolence, HQ at Rix Maadi  
> Orzhov Syndicate: money/extortioner liches, HQ at Orzhova, Church of Deals  
> Selesnya Conclave: nature and healing/green evangelists  
> Izzet League: utilities and engineering/literal guild full of mad scientists  
> Azorius Senate: law and order/bureaucracy cranked to 11. The Jelenn are the debate branch of the guild  
> Boros Legion: police force/actual militant crusader types  
> Simic Combine: Better Living Through Biomancy (Also Mutations). Biosciences gone wild.  
> Gruul: Once in charge of Ravnica's few wild places, which no longer exist; violently oppose urban life.


End file.
